Along
with the bones and shoe parts found on Gardner Island (Nikumaroro) in
1940 was a box which was judged to have once contained a nautical sextant.
Written on the box were numbers which could be the key to establishing
the origin of the box and possibly the identity of the person whose bones
were found with it. We do not know if the box still exists (it was last
known to be in Fiji in 1941), nor do we know for sure just what it looked
like. Here are the descriptions we do have:

Thorough
search has now produced more bones (including lower jaw ) part of
a shoe a bottle and a sextant box. It would appear that … Sextant
box has two numbers on it 3500 (stencilled) and 1542 – sextant being
old fashioned and probably painted over with black enamel.

Mr.
Gatty[note: we suspect that “Mr. Gatty” is the
famous Tasmanian-born aerial navigator Harold Gatty]thinks that
the box is an English one of some age and judges that it was used
latterly merely as a receptacle. He does not consider that it could
in any circumstance have been a sextant box used in modern trans-Pacific
aviation.

Date:

August
11, 1941 – Note to Western Pacific High Commission file 4439-40

Quoting
Commander G. B. Nasmyth, Fijian Royal Meteorological Society:[A]ll I have been able to find out is that the
make of the box – that
is – the dovetailing of the corners – makes it appear to
be of French origin.

A
nautical sextant in the collection of the National Museum of Naval
Aviation in Pensacola, Florida was borrowed from Earhart’s navigator,
Frederick J. Noonan, by a Pan American pilot who was taking navigational
instruction from Noonan. Fred is known to have habitually carried
a nautical sextant with him in addition to an aeronautical bubble
octant. The instrument in Pensacola was manufactered by W. Ludolph,
Bremerhaven, Germany in 1919 and carries the serial number 1090. It
is painted black.

The
box in which it was kept appears to be mahogany. A small notch has
been crudely cut into the inside rear of the cover. The notch is
not required to accommodate the Ludolph sextant.

The only markings
on the box, which features dovetailed corners, are the number 116
handwritten on the front …

…
and the numbers 3547 and 173 handwritten on the bottom. The style
of the handwritten numbers is not unlike Noonan’s handwriting but
neither is it distinctive enough to be certain that numbers were
written by Noonan. Of approximately 500 sextant boxes examined in
collections in the U.S. and in Britain, this is the only one which
features numbers written on the exterior of the box.

A
box similar in appearance to the Pensacola box is this box for another
German sextant. The instrument is described as German-made for the
American market, and the sextant is marked only “Eugenes Fabricat.”
A paper trade label inside the box lid reads “Negus Nautical Instruments,
69 Pearl Street, New York.” The black finish on the brass is poor.
The rectangular fitted box has dovetailed joints.

Another
similar box contains this W.W. II era Merchant Marine English Sextant
manufactured by Henry Hughes & Son Ltd. The sextant comes with what
appears to be original owner’s paperwork consisting of invoice dated
3/28/45 made out to M.C. Klein, 3rd Officer of SS George Dewey.
It, too, is painted black.

The fastening
hooks on the German and British boxes appear to be of identical
design and are different from those on the Pensacola box. The hooks
on the Pensacola box rotate inwards as do the hooks on the other
German sextant box. The the hooks on the British box swing outward.
The British box also has no handle on the front. We can’t see enough
of the German box to tell whether or not it has a handle. No markings
are visible on either the German or the British boxes, but again,
we can’t see the entire boxes.

We’d like to
hear from anyone who can add anything to this rather obscure avenue
of research. We would particularly like to know if the reportedly
stencilled “3500” and apparently not-stencilled “1542”
on the Nikumaroro box have any documentable significance.

Copyright 2019 by TIGHAR, a non-profit foundation.
No portion of the TIGHAR Website may be reproduced by xerographic,
photographic, digital or any other means for any purpose. No portion
of the TIGHAR Website may be stored in a retrieval system, copied,
transmitted or transferred in any form or by any means, whether electronic,
mechanical, digital, photographic, magnetic or otherwise, for any purpose
without the express, written permission of TIGHAR. All rights reserved.